Stephanie Barber: Submerged Narratives

Ed Halter

The first images in Stephanie Barber's 16mm shipfilm
(1998), following its partially occluded title card, are an
inky stretch of waves, made uncannily solid in high-contrast
monochrome. The waves' looping movements are slowed through
step-printing, accentuating the dirt and hairs accumulated on
each frame. One might wonder if the footage is very old,
perhaps from the early years of cinema, a conjecture not
discouraged by the film's silence. Its visual severity could
indicate a history of duping and re-duping stretching back
decades - time compressed into thickening grain - or maybe its
grime and darkness are merely effects of the use of
now-obsolete reversal stock. After a while, text appears
towards the bottom of the frame, where subtitles normally
occur, but laid out in a slightly off-kilter line, as if each
letter had been rubbed down individually. The text reads: 'they
set sail on the tenth of november'. An icon of an old sailing
ship pops into sight, surrounded by a tight square that makes
obvious its artificial imposition on this stuttering sea. A
second line: 'it rained and they were cold'. The waves
disappear, and now the ship seems to float on an undulating
penumbra of white light. Then the final line appears, in faded
text almost blown out by this background, reading 'they had
overestimated their abilities'.

Shipfilm calls to mind Tom Gunning's description of
the 'submerged narratives' found in the work of a generation of
American experimental film-makers slightly earlier than Barber.
Writing in the late 1980s, he observes that in the films of
Lewis Klahr, Phil Solomon, Mark Lapore and others, 'plots stir
just beneath the threshold of perceptibility. The sea swells of
these subliminal stories align images into meaningful but often
indecipherable configurations.'1 He cites this quality as one
tendency of what he dubbed 'minor cinema', taking a cue from
Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'minor
literature',2 a new phase of the avant-garde that
eschewed the grand conceptual ambitions of the Structural film
era in favour of a more gnomic termite-art tinkering. According
to Gunning, adherents of the minor see their roles not as
members of a vanguard, but rather as artists separate from the
rest of cinema, working productively at its margins. 'Stern
necessity has bred an affection for the limits of their medium
rather than frustration,' Gunning argues, fostering 'an
exploitation of film's new identity as an endangered
species.'3

Barber's film and video work, which began in the mid-1990s and
continues to today, shows that this tendency became a lasting
feature of certain strains' experimental production. Barber
also embraces a rough minimalism, transforming the materialist
gestures pioneered by the likes of Peter Kubelka and Malcolm Le
Grice into lyrical, emotive elements, strung together with
great care, yet often bearing the seeming offhandedness of
conversation's idiosyncrasies. As both a film-maker and poet,
she knows that pictures are a language, and words are images.

She writes that shipfilm 'is probably the most
heartbreaking film i have made, the pacing is romantic and
simple, haiku-esque pauses and inclusions, with the words
contrasting this poetry with their factual, disinterested
narration'.4 This description echoes 'the halting
pauses of human existence',5 a phrase Barber uses in reference to the
tempo her own poetry (in this particular case, a series of
'lawn poems' meant to be written in cut grass -words made
material in an unlikely medium). And given the last line of
shipfilm's narration, one cannot help but think of
Sigmund Freud's 'oceanic feeling', his term for the melting of
the ego as it contemplates the eternity of a universe
infinitely greater than itself.6 Such a reading is encouraged by
her text's fragmentary, lower-case humility; smallness leads
the way to a feeling of sublime connection with greater powers,
like Blake's universe in a grain of sand.

This mode of submerged haiku-esque narrative operates as well
in Barber's film flower, the boy, the librarian
(1996), composed of three bits of footage in succession: a
blossom wriggling in re-edited motion; the head of a boy,
looking to the right; and a young woman with glasses, looking
left, and then abruptly covered by a red gel that juts into the
frame. The soundtrack is that of a man reading what sounds like
typing lessons, each letter intoned with a flat rhythm. At
first, the letters are meaningless strings intended merely to
train the movement of the fingers ('j, m, j, space') but by the
film's end they seems to spell out something more
significant with the command 'n, e, e, d, semicolon, space'.
The semicolon, a means of conjoining; the space, a separation.

Letters, notes (1997) likewise explores the material
nature of language, and the emotional density of tiny
statements. The film overlays details of old snapshots with
blocky, animated Letraset texts taken from found letters. The
messages convey a range of purposes: a person asking about a
phone bill, a girl writing her own name in various
permutations, a mysterious memorandum ('code: reduced / version
of lang.'), and a dirty diary entry ('Monday June 2 1991 12:57
pm afternoon Denise lifted up her shirt and show me her
plumpteous [sic] breasts. I paid 89¢ cents.') written
by what one hopes was a child.

As many of these letters indicate, Barber is interested in
language not so much as a formal system but rather as an event
of communication, whether person to person or back to the self
from one's own past. This aspect is most pronounced in two
works that are structured as dialogues: the 16mm film
dogs (2000) and the video the visit and the
play (2008). In the former, Barber acts out a
philosophical discourse on the nature of art, emotion and
individualism, its profundity undercut - and then magnified -
by the fact that her interlocutors are two papier-mâché
dog-head hand-puppets with sad eyes. 'The art-making process,'
muses one dog, 'or the desire to make something at all, is
always marked up with excitement and sadness. The desire to
communicate an idea or emotion in some way, successfully or
not, I think it necessarily points to the solitary nature of
our existence. It's somehow desperate.' Standing in for two
lonely artists, the dogs are manipulated by the arms of the
same puppeteer, and appear starkly in the film against a black
background. The visit and the play involves two pairs
of speakers, each of which is having a contentious
conversation. The first pair, unseen as the camera tracks a
photograph of a crowded pool, represent two women, one of whom
has claimed a 'new career as a world famous psychic'. 'I'm
sensing feelings of hostility,' she says to her partner.
'That's talent,' responds the other. The second half of the
video is a play the first pair attend, enacted by two knotted
clumps of hair in a pile of wigs, displayed on a television
made of snow. The wig-clumps likewise debate, now quoting
Valéry and Hume in the course of their observations. Like
shipfilm's journey, these conversations are poignantly
failed events, each speaker never quite responding adequately
to the language of her cohort, at times verging on nonsense.

The photographs scrutinised in letters, notes and
the visit and the play exemplify another of Barber's
concerns: the effects of transposing one form of media into
another, whether through still images seen within moving ones,
or in the interplay between digital and analogue sources. This
is done to unnerving yet moving effect in the film
Catalog (2005), in which actors create tableaux
vivantes whose lighting and composition imitate the precise
formal qualities of everyday snapshots, and total power,
dead dead dead (2005), which employs 16mm footage of an
arcade videogame's screen during a prompt for audience
interaction -- a gesture towards a more perpendicular dialogue,
that is, one extending beyond the screen itself. But this
interest becomes most pronounced in her video work, only
emerging in the last couple of years. Dwarfs the sea
(2008) presents a series of photographic portraits of men, as
an artificial voice tells stories of their personalities and
relationships with one another, again cut through with tales of
loneliness. (They are described as sailors, and one could
fantasise that they are the unseen crew of shipfilm's
doomed vessel.) The images seen in inversion,
transcription, evening track and attractor (2008) are
reproductions of photos by known artists - Uta Barth, Candida
Höfer, Deborah Willis and Kohei Yoshiyuki -- achieved through
intricately hand-made collages of white-on-white cut-outs. The
accompanying soundtrack consists of 25 or so theoretical
statements on photography, spoken by yet another
computer-generated voice. Mirroring the visual opacity of the
images, the narration's inhuman pacing and intonation, and
occasional glitches, make full comprehension impossible. A long
quote from Susan Sontag, for example, is articulated without
pause between words, flowing together into a dissonant torrent
of synthetic phonemes.

The serial investigation of photography and the formal
deployment of language elements have ancestors in a number of
works typically associated with structural film, particularly
Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia) (1971) and Morgan
Fisher's Production Stills (1970). Such a comparison,
however, underscores the difference between the concerns of
that moment and Barber's own. She seeks to reveal more about
human nature than the nature of the cinematic apparatus. One
tendency of Structural film, at its most overweeningly
rigorous, was the testing out of logical operations through
precise formal patterns. Barber more often approaches cinema as
a philosophical toy, intimately small, in which the play itself
generates both pleasure and insight.

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